Sheila Dickson

Rotation therapy for maniacs, melancholics and idiots: theory, practice and perception in European medical and literary case histories

This article examines the development and use of rotation therapy in the emerging field of psychiatry at the beginning of the 19th century, and the cross-fertilization between British, Irish, German, French and other European proponents of ‘Cox’s Swing’. Its short-lived popularity is linked to prevalent Enlightenment thought, to the development of an industrial and technological society, to the modern medical theories of irritability, and to the new practice of ‘moral management’ of the mentally ill. Case studies documenting the use of the Swing are considered from these perspectives, and are compared with contemporary public reactions in the form of publications in newspapers and of a literary text by German Romantic author Ludwig Achim von Arnim.

‘[D]as Innere des Menschen aufklär[en]’: Poetry as Psychology in Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde

Abstract Poetry and psychology both aim to cast light on the inner life of man, and in the period of the Enlightenment this formed the basis for narrative theory (Friedrich von Blankenburg, Versuch über den Roman) and practice (Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser). In his journal Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, however, Moritz presents psychological insights in short prose form that call into question the premises of both of the above through the kind of narrative instability that was to become a defining element of the Novelle genre in the nineteenth century.